Article from the 'War Nerd' attacking Victor Davis Hanson
GJCar...@yahoo.co.uk
to other hardline neocons:
http://www.exile.ru/2005-July-28/victor_hanson.html
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Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor
by Gary Brecher ( war_...@exile.ru )
I've survived some terrible summers, but this is the worst. Somebody
kill me. Fresno's been putting on a show, crunching a whole lifetime of
stupid misery into a few hot months. And I mean hot. We've been setting
records down here. Today it hit 107 degrees. Tomorrow we're due to
reach 109. Luckily, Thursday should be a cool, breezy 103.
I had figured this summer would be a little easier to handle now that
I've shucked off a layer of blubber (I slimmed down a bit to try to
ease my kidney situation). But no, God just made it a few degrees
hotter to make sure I stay as sweaty and miserable as ever, cooking in
my own fat.
People here have been going crazy since it started heating up. The
Fresno PD managed to get our fine city some international press with a
new approach to fighting crime: cracking down on 11-year-olds. In case
you didn't read about it, what happened was this 11-year-old girl threw
a rock at some kids who were splattering her with water balloons, so
the Fresno cops swooped down with three squad cars and a chopper. They
wrestled her down, cuffed her and charged her with felony assault. She
did a week in juvie isolation, with no access to even her parents,
before they let her go.
Naturally her lawyers yelled racism, because she's Mexican. I don't buy
that. It's not racism, it's plain cowardice. That's the key to
understanding what's happening in the world today: plain old cowardice.
Somewhere along the line we lost all the brave people. Now we've just
got a lot of phony blowhards. The cops who wrestled that little girl
around were just like the cops you see on Reno 911, playing tough once
they were sure the suspect couldn't fight back. I drive past gang
corners every damn day, and I never see the Fresno PD giving those
bastards any trouble-they're too scary. So they wait till it's a little
girl who defended herself against a bunch of bullies, then they swarm
her like a SWAT team.
We've got this Fresno intellectual who likes to strut the same way in
the local paper. He's one of these snotty assholes with three names:
Victor Davis Hanson. Oh, sorry: Doctor Victor David Hanson. He's got a
Ph.D. and he teaches at Fresno State.
This fool passes himself off as a military historian, writing columns
about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else he feels like babbling
about, but he doesn't have a clue about contemporary warfare. Every war
nerd on the net knows more about what's happening in Iraq than he does.
But that doesn't stop him. He teaches Classics, he's written a half
dozen books on ancient warfare, and he never lets you forget that he's
a professor and you're not.
In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don't
have Ph.D.'s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: "What
do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in
common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either
dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush
is 'stupid,' but she-not he-didn't finish high school."
Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of
personally. I guess it's my fault for not getting into Yale on pure
merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about
driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards
and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when
one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from
the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your fucking olive orchards if you
mouth off again."
Professor Hanson is one of these "back to the land" assholes who can
afford to live on a farm because he's got tenure for life at Fresno
State-they can't fire him for anything less than a major felony. It's
classic welfare state socialism that funds his estate, but that doesn't
stop him from moralizing about the benefits of free market solutions.
So he writes these columns from his farm in Selma, a few miles down the
road from Fresno, about the sanctity of private land and private
enterprise and the life lessons of farming.
He doesn't even suspect what a total hypocrite he is. According to his
official online bio, Hanson graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1975. I
don't know if you non-Californians understand what that means. UC Santa
Cruz is the official sex-and-drugs campus of the whole UC system. It's
so hippie-cool and mellow it doesn't even give grades, which are just
too bourgeois. You just get little notes from your teachers. The kids
who go there are rich brats who don't have to worry about getting a
job-because graduating from there is like telling your future employers
you were stoned for four straight years.
And Hanson graduated from there in 1975. I can only dream about what it
must've been like to be a student at Santa Cruz back then, at the
climax of the hippie days. I seriously doubt if anybody on that campus
was un-stoned from enrollment to graduation, or un-laid for more than a
week.
So here's a question for you, Professor Hanson, Mister Morality: how
many coeds did you screw when you were at UC Santa Cruz? And how many
drugs did you take?
But you know, I could take all Hanson's hypocritical pompous bullshit
if he only knew something about contemporary warfare. He doesn't. All
he knows is that he's in favor of Gulf War II, and to defend that mess
he's willing to slander Bush Sr's magnificent victory in Gulf War I.
This is insane, really insane-taking America's only outright strategic
victory since 1945, our most glorious campaign since Inchon, and
turning it into a defeat just so you can make Bush Jr's fiasco look a
little better. Here's Hanson's treasonous account of Gulf War I:
"War I (January 17 to March 3, 1991)
"The First Iraqi War : started over Saddam Hussein's August 2, 1990,
invasion of Kuwait. His occupation precipitated the American-led
coalition's efforts to reclaim Kuwait through land and air attacks.
Saddam's complete capitulation was seen as satisfying the war's
professed claim of restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait.
"But despite retreating from Kuwait and suffering terrible damage to
his armed forces, Saddam, like the Germans in 1918, claimed that his
armies had been repelled while on the offensive. So he passed off a
setback as a draw against the world's superpower - and thus a win by
virtue of his own survival against overwhelming odds.
"In any case, we called off our forces before the destruction of the
Republican Guard. We also refused to go to Baghdad; we let rebellious
Shiites and Kurds be tragically butchered; and we failed to enforce all
the surrender agreements. Apparently the U.S. wished to bow to the U.N.
mandates only to expel Saddam from Kuwait, or was worried about our
Sunni partners who wanted a lid on Kurdish tribalism and Shiite fervor
inside Iraq."
There are so many evil lies here, I don't know where to start. First
there's the phony comparison to Germany after WW I. There's no
comparison at all. Saddam's Kuwait invasion wasn't a nationalist war
like WW I, and no matter what Saddam said, every dog in the street in
Baghdad knew perfectly well that the Iraqi army had been outclassed and
savaged. Moreover, the Germans fought for four years and nearly won,
whereas Saddam got his ass completely whipped in a three-day land war.
Fact is, we did it right in Gulf War I. We neutered Saddam, destroyed
his ability to threaten anybody, and left him in charge of his hellhole
country. It was American diplomacy combined with military power at its
finest. And this pig tries to say it was a defeat!
Hanson goes on to say that we "refused to go to Baghdad" because we
wanted to please the UN. Bullshit. We used the UN to build a huge
alliance (something Bush's idiotic son didn't think was necessary), and
we stayed out of Baghdad because Powell and Bush Sr. knew what would
happen if we tried to occupy Iraqi cities. We're going through the
consequences of that mistake right now; how can anybody pretend not to
understand, by now, why it was a bad idea, and why Bush Sr. was right
the first time?
What's amazing is that Hanson is actually trying to blame Bush Sr. for
not jumping off the cliff first, before his idiotic son did. Like I
said, it's insane-until you realize it's being done just to make
Junior's disaster look good, which Hanson needs to do because he's been
shilling for Bush Jr.'s war from day one. Hanson isn't just insane.
He's one sleazy dude.
He proves his sleaze when he moves on to Gulf War II:
"War IV. (April 2003 to present)
"The Fourth Iraqi War ("The Insurrection," "The Occupation") began
immediately after the end of the conventional fighting and continues
today. It was framed by the fact that the United States would not
simply leave after toppling Saddam yet had never really gone into the
Sunni Triangle in force during the three-week victory. War IV was waged
by a loose alliance of Wahhabi fundamentalists, foreign jihadists, and
former Baathists against the American efforts to fashion an indigenous
Iraqi democratic government."
Here again, there's so many lies it's hard to know where to start.
Like, what the hell does Hanson mean by saying we never attacked the
Sunni Triangle? As military history, that's pure nonsense. The only
reason he says it is because he has to explain to himself how come the
insurgency was able to come on so strong after we kicked ass in the
conventional war. And see, Hanson can't admit to himself that there was
a difference in the kind of war being waged, a transition from
conventional to urban-guerrilla warfare. If he once admitted that we're
dealing with an urban guerrilla war now, he'd have to face the
historical fact that modern armies still don't have an effective
counter for that mode of warfare.
And all that ancient Greek stuff won't help Hanson deal with urban
guerrilla war, because there was nothing like it in the ancient world.
In those days conquerors wiped out cities the second they showed any
sign of uppity behavior. Urban guerrilla wars were pretty quick and
pretty unsuccessful: rise up against the occupier, and literally every
man, woman and child gets slaughtered, and the offending city covered
in salt. End of story.
One of my favorite examples of Roman "pacification" policy was what
happened to the Helvetii, a Celtic tribe that used to live where
Switzerland is now. Europe was a feisty, tricky place in those days,
like Africa is now. Tribes were always on the move.
The Helvetii decided they'd make a move on Northeastern Gaul, grabbing
the land and wiping out the Roman-vassal tribes occupying the land. The
entire Helvetii tribe numbered about 370,000, and from that they could
field about 110,000 fighting men-every male who could hold a spear.
They smashed into the settled Gaul tribes easily, grabbed a swathe of
territory and prepared to keep advancing until they had enough good
land to support the whole tribe.
What the Helvetii hadn't factored into their big move was the Romans.
Julius Caesar got a message from his Gaul vassals pleading for help
against the Helvetii. At this point he had six legions under him in
Gaul, almost 300,000 men. But he wanted more, because he had something
a little more drastic in mind than just defeating the Helvetii. He was
out to exterminate them. So he called up another two legions, which
meant he had 400,000 trained soldiers against 110,000 part-time tribal
warriors.
It was no contest. The Romans surrounded the Helvetii and started
stabbing their way through the mass of warriors, then the civilians. As
they advanced, the legions would herd a few saleable-looking women and
children away from the killing. They were sent to holding pens in the
rear to be sold as slaves. The main body of Roman soldiers kept working
through the mass of Helvetii, stabbing and stabbing. Roman soldiers
were taught to use the short sword-"gladius," which is where
"gladiator" comes from-to stab, not slash. Stabbing made a deeper
wound, more likely to tear up a guy's guts and give him a fatal
infection. The stab was also quicker than the big dramatic downward
smash those hammy heavy-metal barbarians were addicted to.
At the end of the battle, they had slaughtered 220,000 men, women and
children-60% of the whole tribe. Must have been exhausting too. Imagine
the sheer hard work it took to kill that many screaming, scrambling
people with the Roman short sword, not much bigger than a Bowie knife.
We could do it, way more easily than the Romans. We'd burn only as many
calories as it takes to press a button. If we had the will, we could
wipe out the whole population of the Sunni Triangle in a few days. If
we used neutron bombs, we could do it without even messing up the area
too badly. It would sure stop the insurgency.
Trouble is, that kind of genocide just isn't popular these days, and
nobody, not even Professor Hanson, is ready to argue for it. It's hard
to argue you want to bring democracy to the Sunnis by making them
extinct. And what Hanson and morons like him won't admit is that short
of genocide, there is no military solution to urban guerrilla warfare.
So Hanson cheats like a ninth grader, trying to avoid facing the
urban-guerrilla problem. He makes fake lists like this one: "From the
various insurgencies of the Peloponnesian War to the British victory
over Communist guerrillas in Malaya, there remain constants across
2,500 years of time and space that presage victory or defeat."
Oh, like we're supposed to believe he chose that Malaya example just by
chance, huh? It so happens that the Malayan insurgency of the 1950s is
the ONLY guerrilla war that was won by the occupying army, in this case
the Brits, and that's why Bush's spinners like to cite It. You know why
the Brits "succeeded"? It's real simple: the insurgents were all ethnic
Chinese, and the Malays hated their guts. They were a small, easily
identified ethnic minority. The Malays never needed much of an excuse
to start chopping up Chinese people, and when the Brits gave them
license to kill they went at it full time. Then the Brits up and left.
It was a relatively small affair: over 12 years, some 7,000 MRLA
guerrillas were killed. Just to give you a real comparison, one
American general recently said that in the last year alone, we've
killed or captured 50,000 Iraqi insurgents, yet, this same general
admitted that the insurgency is only gaining strength.
If Hanson thinks we can chop up millions of heavily armed, aggressive
Sunni Iraqis the way the Brits mopped up a few thousand Red Chinese in
Malaysia, he's insane. And maybe he is-all those years of the state
subsidizing his phony "farm" and students sucking up to him for a good
grade have driven him into a psychotic delusional state.
But I don't really think he's insane-just a traitor, a liar willing to
keep shoving American troops and money into a meatgrinder just so he
doesn't have to admit he was wrong. Sooner or later we're going to have
to face it: these NeoCons don't care about America any more than Stalin
cared about Russia. They're not just wrong. They're traitors.